Curt's Sacrifice

After the characters become prisms reflecting the light of veracity, the reader cannot help but believe that none of them deserve the grim fates that befell them. When Curt Lemon stepped on the rigged explosive round and subsequently died, O’Brien poetically described the event by writing, “Sharp gray eyes, lean and narrow-waisted, and when he died it was almost beautiful, the way the sunlight came around him and lifted him up and sucked him high into a tree full of moss and vines and white blossoms,” (O’Brien 67). Expectedly, though, it takes O’Brien less than fifteen pages to provide the reader with another description of the incident: “I remember pieces of skin and something wet and yellow that must’ve been the intestines. The gore was horrible,

and stays with me. But what wakes me up twenty years later is Dave Jensen singing ‘Lemon Tree’ as we threw down the parts,” (O’Brien 79). Even though the first description is much more appealing, the second description is certainly easier to believe, especially when considering O'Brien's instructions throughout the vignette on how to write a true war story. He makes countless claims on the lack of morals and humanity in a true war story; the second quote clearly demonstrates this significantly better. Another particularly dark death is that of Kiowa; the life of a noble man coming to an end in a field of defecation. After a nocturnal mortar strike, he sank into muck created from the wastes of the villagers, and was not found until well into the morning: “Mitchell Sanders finally nodded and said, ‘Let’s get it done,’ and they took hold of the legs and pulled up hard, then pulled again, and after a moment Kiowa came sliding to the surface. A piece of his shoulder was missing; the arms and face were cut up with shrapnel,” (O’Brien 167). This morbid description certainly has the capacity to make the reader’s stomach churn, just as Curt’s violent death is.

More importantly than this, though, is the question of whether or not either character deserved to die. Even though Curt was known for his shenanigans, he was still a boy, he was still human. O’Brien describes Lemon as being ignorant of the danger of the war as a, saying, “Right away, Lemon and Rat Kiley started goofing. They didn’t understand about the spookiness. They were kids; they just didn’t know,” (O’Brien 66). Lemon was simply a boy thrown into a war that didn’t make sense; he didn’t deserve to die. Kiowa certainly did not deserve his grim fate either. This was the same Kiowa who understood O’Brien’s dismay at murdering a man: “Then after a long empty time he said, ‘Take it slow. Just go wherever the spirit takes you,’” (120). This was the same Kiowa who showed disdain upon the abuse of a sacred place of the Vietnamese: “‘Setting up here. Its wrong. I don’t care what, it’s still a church,” (116). For such a respectable man to die in a pile of shit is not fair in anyway at all. Only a depraved person would make the claim that Kiowa, Lemon, or any of O’Brien’s other deceased characters deserved their twisted

fates.
Since O’Brien’s realistic characters die without true reason, the reader begins to wonder what the point of the war is.

The author uses metafiction to acknowledge this line of questioning, even going as far as to involve an entire vignette, “How to Tell a True War Story,” in attempting to answer it. The veteran discusses with the reader the point of war as portrayed in real war stories. In short, the answer is that, quite simply, there is none. As O’Brien states, “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest proper models of human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done,” (65). He clearly sees no higher calling in the battlefield; it is dark, pointless, and barbaric. No, it is more than barbaric: it is an ancient, archaic, and even eldritch practice. It is the practice that all animals on our planet engage in: natural selection, the ultimate test of who can survive. Fictional O’Brien himself, at one point, sought to reject it upon partaking in it first hand, writing, “He told me that it was a good kill, that I was a soldier and this was war, that I should shape up and stop staring and ask myself what the dead man would’ve done if things were reversed. None of it mattered,” (127). Kiowa tells O’Brien that it is kill or be killed, and the fictional O’Brien shuts down and cannot grasp it. However, the metafictional O’Brien speaking with his reader knows that it is vulgar, it is violent, it is crude: “As

a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil,” (65-66). In a more than secular sense, evil is anything that violates the most basic social contract, the law that one will not harm another, because the other will not harm him or her. War does not adhere to that law; moreover, it embraces the consequences of breaking the age old contract. War promotes violence and the basic reality of kill or be killed, pitting man against man. War is not poetic, and neither are its stories: “True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis,” (74). Natural selection is not abstract, once laid bare it does not require in depth analysis; it simply is. It is not generalized either; it is not a sweeping statement from a few specific cases, it is a law taken from every case. As O’Brien eloquently wrote, “You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end. Not then, not ever,” (72). Evolution has not come to a stop, and there is no sign of it ever doing so. War is just one of evolution’s many facades; violent conflict is just different from its other veils because it is so thin.
After using metafiction to create dialogue with the reader, Tim O’Brien subsequently humanizes himself and his accompanying cast of characters in The Things They Carried to allow for the pointless tragedy of death to set in, tragically illustrating the idea that war is nothing more than man verses man in the never ending process of evolution. After O’Brien erases the line between himself and his character, he does the same for his other characters. The angst and dismay that the reader feels at their deaths gives O’Brien the ability to show the reader his grim realization about war. Metafictional elements in the text are imperative in O’Brien’s deliverance of the final, seemingly twisted blow. Not only do they paint O’Brien and his comrades in a human light, but they aid in his discussion about the lack of beautiful meaning in war. If he or she looks hard enough into O'Brien's collection of vignettes, the reader can see past their glorious preconceptions about war and see the truth that scarred the veteran into feeling such wretched emotions. It is the truth forbidden to be told by a soldier, and only understandable when told by a poet: war is merely natural selection en masse.